Impressions: Spacepup Entertainment’s horror game Tell No One demo

Malaysia-based Spacepup Entertainment recently showcased a demo of its upcoming horror game Tell No One at the Comic Fiesta in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The first-person horror game is a mishmash of previous ones, making use of Fatal Frame’s camera viewing concept and Amnesia’s lack of combat.

Similar to Indonesian-made DreadOut, Tell No One puts you in the shoes of a journalist who wakes up in an eerie village. The demo is kept deliberately short at around three minutes to enable most of the crowd at Comic Fiesta to try their hand at it, but still manages to be a pretty creepy experience. This is the full demo:

Tell No One is played from a first-person point of view and has you equipped with just an outdated digital camera. This camera can only be used to view visuals on another plane, such as the creepy green handprint in the video. There is no combat in the game, as Spacepup have opted to put the player in the role of an investigator rather than ghostbuster.

The demo shows a great atmosphere and a decent attention to detail considering Spacepup is barely a month and a half old and has a team of just four people. The background music and sound effects of Tell No One are atmospheric and induce chills, and the heavy panting of your character is a nice touch. Later on in the game, after the big scare, you can only hear your heart beating in your ears. Also, for some inexplicable reason, you get to look down into your own cleavage when the camera is angled towards the floor.

Although the background music and sound were great, I absolutely didn’t like the poorly-voiced protagonist, in spite of her just uttering three words at the very beginning of the demo. Please do better than that, guys!

Another gripe I have with the demo is how there is a lack of characteristic Southeast Asian ghosts, or hantu, in the game. Technical art director Yuen Wai Leong says that the team wanted to connect to Southeast Asian culture as well as expose it to the international market, but I didn’t see much local culture in the demo.

The demo shows dark shadows, a disgruntled female spirit, as well as a little boy who seems to have just finished crying blood, none of which are characteristic of Southeast Asia, unlike the Pontianak), the orang minyak, or even the hantu tetek or penanggalan. According to Yuen, the game will revolve around the three entities we’ve already seen in the demo, albeit with more dark shadows. As a Southeast Asian and a fan of our folklore, I am definitely hoping the team will produce more ghosts and ghouls.

The dark shadow. T_T

Still, you wonder if Spacepup is capable of doing so, as character animations in Tell No One are a little lacking, especially in the protagonist, and this is obvious when the game switches to a third-person cutscene. This is definitely a worry if the full game will contain a lot of cutscenes, but if you’re going to be wandering through this village most of the time then the first-person experience is visually pleasing and exciting.

In spite of being rough around the edges, Tell No One still manages to pull off very polished environments and fluid camera control. It’s not a stellar game at the moment, not by any means, but it’s one that shows great promise especially coming from a country where game development is still just taking off. Tell No One is also looking to support the Oculus Rift, but Spacepup will add on to that only when the game gets closer to launch.

Yuen has told Games in Asia that the game is only about 60 to 70 percent complete, and that they can’t commit to a fixed launch, though a report by The Star states that early access will be available by the end of February. Yuen and team are hoping to get the game onto Steam Greenlight and if they start adding more ghosts, we just might, too!

You can follow Spacepup Entertainment on Facebook to keep up with the game’s development, or better still, try the demo for yourself.

The demo was tailored for controller use so as to have a gentler learning curve for the general public. The actual game will be played with mouse and keyboard. Spacepup Entertainment is currently being developed under the l337 accelerator, which is funded by Malaysia’s Ministry of Finance.